Book Club: ‘Perhaps the moral here is that gorging on dubious victory inevitably leaves a bad taste’

Taylor will be discussing it at Off the Shelf festival on 18 October 2023, 7:30 pm, at the Millennium Gallery. Tickets are priced from £7 to £9 and are available to buy from Off the Shelf website.

In The Stirrings, a beautifully written memoir of girlhood, Taylor transports readers to 1976, the last summer that she would spend with both parents at home in Sheffield. The echoes of history haunt the streets of Sheffield, and the Yorkshire Ripper frames the backdrop of Catherine’s childhood. The memoir unfolds the events of Catherine’s life amidst economic crisis, the Miners’ Strike in the 1980s, and the nuclear threat, blending grit with nostalgia, the dread of growing up along with its joys. The Stirrings is a poetic chronicle of the journey from adolescence into adulthood in the Steel City.

The Sheffield Telegraph publishes below an exclusive extract from The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson on 3 August 2023. You can borrow the book from Sheffield libraries or buy or order the book at any good bookshop, including your local Sheffield independents Rhyme and Reason, La Biblioteka and Juno Books.

EXTRACT FROM THE STIRRINGS: A MEMOIR IN NORTHERN TIME

BY CATHERINE TAYLOR

It was the beginning of a long, hot summer. On the outskirts of Fulwood, lapwings and skylarks swooped over the drowsy Mayfield Valley. On Clarkehouse Road, at the main entrance to the botanical gardens near school, the ice-cream van was always busy. After exams each afternoon, my friend Nora and I queued up for sophisticated mint Cornettos (99s had been relegated to childhood, along with orange ice lollies) and wandered the paths and lawns, shabby and neglected like all our favourite places. I no longer climbed the statue of the god Pan in the rose garden to furtively kiss his cold metal lips as I did as a child, or run from the imagined terrors of the Victorian bear pit, its dark recesses containing the ghost of a poor lumbering bear, rattling in its chains for over a century.

The gardens opened in 1836, built to a design won in competition by Robert Marnock, gardener at Bretton Hall in Wakefield. The beautiful glasshouses, known as the Paxton Pavilions, were named after Joseph Paxton, then working at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and later designer of The Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The palace was afterwards moved to Sydenham, south London. As a child in Slough, my father witnessed the palace burn down through the night of 30 November 1936: the flames could be seen across eight counties.

The glasshouses in Sheffield were near-derelict, with random broken panes, as if someone had been aimlessly throwing stones. The aviary’s two miserable African parrots, each with one leg in an iron ring, were clamped mournfully to their perches, blue, grey, and red plumage bedraggled and dusty. No one knew how old they were. The aviary and the aquarium were created in two of the glasshouses in the early 1950s as a result of War Damage money – reparations for Sheffield’s suffering during the Blitz. In the stuffy aquarium, dark sinister shapes moved behind dirty glass, the only light coming from the blue, red, and silver flashes of the tiny neon tetras.

Further down the gardens, the bronze metal statue of Victory stood high on its plinth. Victory commemorated the fallen of Sheffield in the Crimean War of 1854–6. Twenty-two thousand British soldiers died in the war, mostly of disease. Sheffield supplied armaments as well as troops to the Crimean war effort. Henry Bessemer, a prolific inventor (his Bessemer converter changed the face of steel production forever) used his steelworks in the city to create a new type of artillery shell, in the shape of a rocket.

More means of destruction, more ingenious ways in which to injure and kill.

After Russia was defeated at the siege of Sebastopol, and up until war officially ended in April 1856, Sheffield celebrated with gas illuminations, processions, banners, a public holiday, and somewhat tasteless hangings of effigies of the Emperor of Russia. Grinders produced knives engraved with the names of battle victories, workhouse inmates were allowed ‘unlimited’ roast beef. The pièce de résistance of all this fanfare was a Crimean ‘monstre cake’ weighing four tons, created by confectioner George Bassett, and commissioned by a local entrepreneur. Due to its size, the cake was carried through the city balanced on three wagons travelling abreast. The icing alone weighed 412 pounds. Complaints about the quality of the cake, which was not properly cooked, came thick and fast. ‘A proportion of the cake was really excellent, but a large quantity of it was unfit to eat,’ griped one letter to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph.

Perhaps the moral here is that gorging on dubious victory inevitably leaves a bad taste.

The need for nationalistic and patriotic celebration is peculiar to war, a collective public show of mania to hide the human cost. Entries for the South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1872, bleakly gave the following cause of insanity for a number of patients: ‘Sons having gone to the Crimean War.’

One son was George Partington, whose headstone in the General Cemetery included his Crimean helmet, carved in stone. (George Bassett, of the ‘monstre cake’ and Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts fame, is also buried there). George Partington survived the Battle of Balaclava and also action at Inkerman and Sebastopol. After Balaclava he was cared for by Florence Nightingale. I would frequently pass George’s grave and extravagant stone helmet on my trips to the cemetery, sitting on the broken chapel steps – the chapel was my own citadel, my personal House of Atreus. There I would smoke and read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets out loud to the straggling weeds, the crows, the tombs, the urns, and the silent interred. Often Nora and I would meet there, and we’d choke on our attempts to inhale Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with gold tips, swigging whisky that burned our throats from a bottle one of us had purloined.

By the summer of 1983, the chapel had been boarded up, eliminating all evidence of the afternoon the summer before when I had drunkenly daubed ‘HELLO DARKNESS’ on the back wall, using a discarded can of paint found nearby. Perhaps it would be excavated one day, like Pompeii or the frescoes at Knossos, revealing my crappy vandalism from thousands of years before. Except the planet wouldn’t last another thousand years. Or a hundred years. Or even ten.